Anam Cara

MÁMÉAN

On this beautiful foggy morning—the ideal landscape to see these mountains in—we are at the foot of Máméan in the middle of the Connemara mountains. There is a deep layer of cloud halfway down the mountain. The light is very mute. In certain places the morning sun is coming through the clouds, making the fog very white, and there is a stream flowing to our right, coming down the mountain. There is a great stillness. The sheep are all in their first stage of morning activity, grazing away, in their lovely Zen kind of nonchalance. We are about to ascend…

I wasn’t born here in Connemara but I have lived here a long time and I really find the landscape an incredible presence, a companion in my life. People often think of the Connemara landscape as very lonesome. I live in a little cottage down here, and in some strange way you are never lonesome here, because if you look out the window, there is the constant drama of the landscape unfolding before you in the different light that is always at play here. I have never known a landscape that is as dependent on light as the Connemara landscape. When the light is here the whole place is luminous and really alive with such subtlety of color. When the light goes, the landscape is so eerie and in the grip of gravity. I’ve always been very moved by this, and several years ago I tried to express it in a poem called “Connemara in Our Mind.”

Connemara in Our Mind

It gave us

the hungry landscapes

resting upon

the unalleviated

bog-dream,

put us out

there, where

tenderness never settled,

except for the odd nest

of grouse mutterings

in the grieving rushes,

washed our eyes

in the glories of light.

In an instant

the whole place flares

in a glaze of pools,

as if a kind sun

let a red net

sink through the bog,

reach down to a forgotten

infancy of granite,

and dredge up

a haul of colors

that play and sparkle

through the smother of bog,

pinks, yellows,

amber and orange.

Your saffron scarf,

filled with wind,

rises over your head

like a halo,

then swings to catch

the back of your neck

like a sickle.

The next instant

the dark returns

this sweep of rotting land,

shrunken and vacant.

Listen,

you can almost hear

the hunger falling

back into itself.

This is no place

to be.

With the sun

withdrawn,

the bog wants to sink,

break

the anchor of rock

that holds it up.

We are left.

There is no one

who knows us.

In our monotone

we beg the bound stone

for our first echo.

From Echoes of Memory

In a certain way, this landscape belongs to no one, but primarily to itself. Landscape is the firstborn of creation. It was here for hundreds of millions of years before ever a plant or an animal arrived here. It was also here, obviously, before the human face ever emerged on earth. It must have seemed very strange to the ancient eye of landscape when we arrived here. Landscape has a huge, pre-human memory. It precedes everything that we know. I often think that you could talk almost of a “clay-ography”: the whole biography of the earth. Everything depends of course on whether you think landscape is dead matter or whether you think it is a living presence.

I think there is life in these rocks and in these great mountains around about us, and because there is life, there is memory. The more you live among mountains like this, the more aware you become of the cadences of the place and the subtlety of the place, its presence and personality. When you look out from here this morning, you see at the front of Máméan the beginning of the Twelve Bens. The fog is halfway down the mountain, and there is another half of the mountain concealed inside that fog that the eye cannot see. With the mind you cannot penetrate that blanket of cover but with the imagination you can sense the presence that is actually there that you cannot see with the eye. And all the time, with the light and the cloud and the rain and the mist, a whole kind of narrative of presence is unfolding, hiding itself, emerging. Not alone that, one of the frightening things about Connemara for a lot of people is how lunar and how bare it actually seems. One must not forget of course that it is mainly bog, and bog is the afterlife of a forest, of all the trees that were here. So even though we are looking down now on major emptiness and bare granite mountains, there was a time when this place was completely clustered and covered with forests and trees. There is a poem that I wrote a while ago trying to reimagine that, called “The Angel of the Bog”:

The Angel of the Bog

The angel of the bog mourns in the wind

That loiters all over these black meadows.

Remembers how it chose branches to strum

From the orchestra of trees that stood here;

How at twilight a chorus of birds came

To silence in nests of darkening air.

Raindrops filter through leaves, silver the air,

Wash off the film of dust to release nets

Of fragrance on which the wind can sweeten

Before expiring among the debris

That brightens each year with fallen color

Before the weight of winter seals the ground.

The dark eyes of the angel of the bog

Never open now when dawn comes to dress

The famished grass with splendid veils of red,

Amber, white, as if its soul were urgent

And young with possibility and dreams

That a vanished life might become visible.

From Conamara Blues

MEMORY

If the human eye had been able to look out over this landscape maybe ten thousand years ago or more, all it would have seen would have been gray, dead black ice everywhere and everything covered completely. It must have been an incredibly frightening and suffocating experience for the land that all its color was overtaken gradually with the surge of the gray breath of the cold, and then the snow, and then the ice freezing down on top of it. To be suffocated under hundreds of feet of this pack ice and to have lived that way for thousands of years must have been an incredible experience for the landscape. You can imagine when the first trickles of water began to loosen and the glaciers began to move, and the landscape became freed of this whole darkness on top of it, the first time that the sun touched it, and seeds maybe hidden for thousands of years began to awaken in the earth—that must have been an incredible emergence for the landscape. So the landscape has the memory of the time of ice that the human knows nothing about; except, I believe that we are made out of clay, that in some sense that memory is within our clay as well. Maybe that is the reason that fear can get to us so quickly, that maybe what fear does is awaken this relic cold in the bone again.

We hear here behind us the tattered screeching of a crow and we see the birds soaring in and sweeping out of the place. It is lovely to watch animals and see how at home they are in a landscape. Sheep are, I think, the undercover mystics of the Connemara landscape: I often think they are totally in a Zen mode of stillness! You would often see them, when driving the roads here, lying out in the middle of the road paying no attention to you as you slow down and pass on. They are chewing and ruminating on something totally different altogether. And there are huge populations of birds here that know these places better than the human foot or the human eye can ever know. They fit together, the landscape and the animals. The animals of course are our older brothers and sisters—they were here before we were. I often think that one of the next breakthroughs in the evolution of human consciousness will be the recognition of the subtle complexity and the hidden inner world that animals carry around with them. The innocence and silence of the animal world has a huge subtlety to it that is anything but dumb, but rather notices everything and is present in everything. Animals carry a huge ministry of witness to the silence of time and to the depth of nature. They are like the landscape in a sense: they live too in the mode of silence. It must be strange for a mountain to look at humans and the way they go around, their limbs and their eyes blurred by their desire and movement. And their inability to stay still in the one place. Pascal said that most of our troubles occur from our inability to sit still in a room, and stone manages that. Look at the stones here. They have been here for tens of thousands of years, but they don’t move, they just stay still all the time. When you look out at the Twelve Bens, there is little enough distance between them, but they have never once, in hundreds of thousands of years, managed to move or to relate to one another. I often feel that there is a world, maybe an infinite world of dream, hidden at the heart of a mountain, and that maybe part of the duty of the artist is in a certain sense to excavate the secret dream world of the mountain in an imaginary way. If you do agree that landscape is alive and that it is a presence, maybe then it is in the shape of landscape, the form of mountains, that you actually get an expression of the state of the place. If you go from that perspective, then the mountains of Connemara have risen very high, almost as noble guardians of the memory of the place and as lookouts in some sense for the infinite and the eternal.

INTRUSION

This is of course a place of pilgrimage. Professor Míchéal McGréil of Maynooth has done great work here in getting a little church built, and there is a beautiful statue here by Cliodhna Cussen of St. Patrick, Aoire Mháiméan, with the sheep just round his legs in the stone, beautifully carved by her. On Good Friday, Míchéal McGréil leads Stáisiúin na Croise here and Joe John Mac an Iomaire sings that sean-nós song Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire, which would break your heart with the pathos of it. I often think that our liturgies have become very bony and very spindly and have none of the sensuous textures of landscape in them. Maybe that would be one way of reviving liturgy, bringing it out into the landscape and allowing the elemental force of the landscape to clothe the liturgy again with sensuous texture and enable us to come in.

As humans, do we intrude too much on the landscape? One of the most wonderful photographers in Ireland, a person who specializes in Connemara, is Fergus Bourke. He has taken some amazing black-and-white pictures of this place. I remember one day we had exactly that conversation: what gives the person the right to intrude on this place? I suppose the only thing you can say is that the quality of your presence here in this way, in order not to be voyeuristic or consumerist, has to slow down to the level of attention where you begin to come into the rhythm of the landscape. I think Fergus Bourke’s work is a witness to that, to incredible moments where he almost catches the landscape out in conversation with itself.

SILENCE

One of the things that humans have done, and especially in Western consciousness, is that we have hijacked all the primary mystical qualities for the human mind, and we have made this claim that only the human self has soul, that everything else is “de-souled” or “unsouled” as a result of that. I think that is an awful travesty, because landscape has a soul and a presence, and landscape—living in the mode of silence—is always wrapped in seamless prayer. In my book Eternal Echoes, I tried to explore that notion of the prayer of landscape. Meister Eckhart said that nothing in the universe resembles God so much as silence, so if you think about silence in that sense, then to come into silence is to come into the presence of the Divine. In a way, you allow yourself to be enfolded by that stillness. In a real sense, the deepest thing in a human heart is not the verbiage but is actually that still silence—not the silence of Buddhism, which often seems to me maybe something anonymous—but is the silence of intimacy where no word is needed and where a word would actually be a fracture.

To the post-modern mind, silence is terror. One of the healing ministries that a landscape performs is as a custodian of a great unclaimed silence that urbanized post-modernity has not raided yet. One of my fears would be, because of the way technology is invading space now, with the invention of virtual space and cyberspace, that we now have the commercialization of space. It is a nightmare scenario that in ten or twenty years’ time, leaving Oughterard and driving that bare stretch of road here to Máméan, which is empty and vacant and has this lovely void quality, that you could be liable to drive it and have at every juncture these beamed images of things to sell or things to do! The invasion of space could actually get to that level.

DARKNESS

On the eve of the New Millennium, I wanted to try and do something special. It seemed to me to be a night that you could be alone with landscape. I went off over Black Head and spent the night on the mountain, and it was really fascinating. When you go out in a place like that on your own where humans never live, but have passed through during the day and have rarely been there in the night, you feel that you have come in to a network of sounds that you don’t normally hear. At the beginning the sounds are frightening because you don’t know what they are, but then you settle down with them and you feel yourself being taken into the landscape. It was lovely to watch the dawn coming out to the landscape. The moon was behind the mountain that night, and then the dawn came in on the limestone that morning. It was almost as if the sea had vacated the place; the lime was rendered so white by the new sun of the first day of the new millennium.

Here in Connemara there is a deeper kind of darkness than in the limestone of Clare, which is a very white, feminine kind of stone, sisterly, friendly in the light. Here there is kind of a light resistance and it gets very, very dark, but when it gets dark on a very cold night the sky is magnificent in terms of stars. Because you have no light pollution, you get this clarity of all these little white apertures in this big wall of darkness twinkling down at you. It is really amazing. You become aware that you are living in a universe. During the day with all the clouds, you move on because you are busy, but at night, when you get a chance to linger and really look, you become aware of the infinite distances that are out there, and the light that is reaching you now is coming to you from stars that have gone out of existence for thousands of years. It is an amazing tenderness of distance that somehow reaches you.

One of the most fascinating aspects of a landscape like this is its interior darkness. We live on the surface of the planet and there is an infinity of darkness that we rarely see. We see it when we open a grave. We create an opening where there is a huge eternal night that is never fractured by light, but lives all the time underneath us. One of the first times I encountered that as a child was when we cut turf on the bog. The first barr or layer of turf was very brown and soggy, but as you cut further down you came to the best turf, the clear black stuff. You were going back through hundreds and thousands of years finding seeds of old plants, bits of bog deal and bog oak. In a sense you were going into the memory of landscape that was totally pre-human. No writer has explored that better than Seamus Heaney in his amazing collection North, where he goes into the secret archive of the bog. It is done with such tight formal beauty, and there is such a sense of edge and danger to it.

WILDNESS

As humans, we need a forceful dialectic of physical, sensuous, elemental interaction with landscape. If you look at the wildlife about us—rabbits, birds, foxes—there is a seamless kind of wildness in them. There is a sense of fluency with the place they are in and the way they move in it. One of the reasons that the post-modern mind is so packed and tight is that we have lost touch with our wildness. One of the most natural ways of coming home to your wildness is to go out into a wild place. Visually, this is often evident in people’s faces. Years ago, when people worked more on the land, they had a winnowed look on their faces. Now there is a great homogenization of our appearance. Similarly in the way people walked. Land people walked in a land kind of way. The spread of the land was on them, as we would say. Now more and more people walk in a corridor fashion, unlike the peasants who walked the land in their own way. I love the word “peasant.” Those who use it in a derogatory manner are just uninformed, naive and vulgar. It is very difficult for people of the land to find a vocabulary for the dignity of their work and presence and belonging in the land. So much of modern opinion is fashioned in the urban world and by urban forces. How much of the television we watch refers to the land in a way that would make the people who live on the land feel they are in a noble setting? Very little, I suspect, and yet if we go back in folk consciousness there was a time when that was the most beautiful way to dwell on the earth.

WATER

Having climbed up Máméan we have a bird’s-eye view and we realize how much water there is in this landscape. There is a huge conversation in Connemara between granite and water. All around us are beautiful lakes, with mountain streams pouring into them. I love mornings after heavy rain when you hear the music of the water finding its way down the mountains. Chiffon-like streams ornament and bedeck the mountain as they weave their way. I wrote about this in a poem about Gleninagh, which is only down the road from here.

Gleninagh

The dark inside us is sistered outside

in night which dislikes the light of the face

and the colors the eye longs to embrace.

Night adores the mountain, wrapped to itself,

a giant heart beating beneath rock and grass

and a mind stilled inside one, sure thought.

Something has broken inside this Spring night,

unconsolably its rain teems unseen

onto Gleninagh Mountain’s listening depth.

Next morning the light is cleansed to behold

the glad milk of thirty streams pulse and spurt

out of unknown pores in the mountain’s hold.

From Echoes of Memory

Now it has started to mist and rain. The rain is never far away here! I welcome it because one of my fears is the way the government relentlessly nurtures the tourist industry. Ireland is a small country and if the tourist numbers aren’t modified it could be overrun. Voyeuristic commercial tourism can do a lot of damage. The English scientist Rupert Sheldrake was asked what single change he would recommend for the new millennium that could make a difference to the world. His reply was that every tourist should become a pilgrim.

There is something eternal about the landscape. It wants to address us but we are not subtle enough to pick it up. The radar of our senses, while beautiful, is incredibly limited. This is illustrated for me by a parable I was once told. There was a stone in the corner of a meadow and under that stone lived a colony of ants. They were just ordinary ants but among them lived a genius ant, an Einstein ant. One day the board of the colony addressed the genius ant, telling it that there was nothing more for it to learn and it would have to leave them and go out into the world. So on a misty October evening the colony bestowed its valediction on the genius and it made its entry into the world. There happened to be a totally non-metaphysical horse grazing nearby. Regardless of how brilliant our genius ant is, it will never be able to perceive the horse, such is the disproportion in size….So I wonder are there presences all around us, that because of the disproportion between our senses and their presence, we are not picking up at all? We are seeing a lot more vacancy and voids in the world than actually exist. Maybe it is the role of the artists and mystics to attend to the seeming emptiness about us and find incredible riches there. Wendell Berry is one such artist. He is a farmer and writer who lives in Kentucky and he attends deeply to nature. I will conclude with a beautiful poem of his from the series Sabbaths, entitled “I Go Among Trees and Sit Still.”

I Go Among Trees and Sit Still

I go among trees and sit still

All my stirring becomes quiet around me like

circles on water,

My tasks lie in their places where I left them,

asleep like cattle,

Then what is afraid of me comes and lives

awhile in my sight,

What it fears in me leaves me and the fear of me

leaves it,

It sings and I hear its song,

Then what I am afraid of comes,

I live for a while in its sight

What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it

leaves me.

It sings and I hear its song

After days of labor, mute in my consternations

I hear my song at last, and I sing it.

As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.

In Praise of the Earth

Let us bless

The imagination of the Earth.

That knew early the patience

To harness the mind of time,

Waited for the seas to warm,

Ready to welcome the emergence

Of things dreaming of voyaging

Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse

The growth until the face of the earth

Brightens beneath a vision of color

When the ages of ice came

And sealed the earth inside

An endless coma of cold,

The heart of the earth held hope,

Storing fragments of memory,

Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth

That offers ground for home

And holds our feet firm

To walk in space open

To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence,

And certainty of mountains:

Their sublime stillness,

Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden

Trusting the first warmth of spring

Until its black infinity of cells

Becomes charged with dream;

Then the silent, slow nurture

Of the seed’s self, coaxing it

To trust the act of death.

The humility of the earth

That transfigures all

That has fallen

Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the earth,

Opening to receive

Our worn forms

Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the earth

For all our sins against her:

For our violence and poisonings

Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us

The ancient clay,

Holding the memory of seasons,

The passion of the wind,

The fluency of water,

The warmth of fire,

The quiver-touch of the sun

And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,

To live to the full

The dream of the earth

Who chose us to emerge

And incarnate its hidden night

In mind, spirit and light.

From To Bless the Space Between Us